Update: a short notice on the blog post now reads that “Floorp’s code is now fully public again.” It seems the developer has reversed course, which is good news. The original article continues below.
Recently, a few people suggested I give the browser Floorp a try, a Firefox fork with some additional UI changes and additions. Since it was based on Firefox ESR, however, I saw no point in even trying it, because I prefer to be on the latest Firefox release. It seems I accidentally made the right choice, since yesterday the developers behind Floorp decided to take their modifications closed source.
The appearance of Floorp forks – which, may I remind you, is a fork itself – seems to be the cause.
I know it’s not nice of me to say, but Floorp has been in too much demand. It am surprise to me that companies and organizations would fork a fork that I had created when I was still a teenager, and at first I was happy about it, but it was not beneficial to me, and on the contrary, it was mentally draining.
There were forks that wanted to hide the fact that they were Floorp forks, forks that did not want to contribute to Floorp at all, forks that used the code for life and just changed the name of Floorp, and many other forks were born.
↫ Floorp blog
It seems the developer of Floorp is rather young, and started the project as a teenager, and as such, I don’t think we should be too harsh on them – I did some dumb things as a teenager – but complaining about forks of your own fork seems a bit disingenuous, regardless of how young and inexperienced you are. I understand seeing your work forked into competing browsers can be frustrating, but it’s a core part of the open source world, especially if you yourself owe your product to forking, too.
Small forks of products as complicated and important as web browsers or linux distributions are dangerous to use even if they are FOSS.
To me it’s just this “new” scary complete misunderstanding of open source that is the much much much bigger issue.
Yoda says, “Continue on this path and work for Microsoft you must.”
So the developer of Floorp is Japanese? Because that would explain it. Because it seems the Japanese just don’t get the philosophy and concept of the open-source movement, or probably just don’t care about following the “spirit of the law”. Or in the worst-case scenario, they are actively against it.
@doyac
I’m not sure the Japanese lack an understanding of open-source, but they have a much stronger social commitment to honouring copyright and trademark. In Japan the artist who changes a common poster to a Picasso with the swipe of a brush is highly regarded, the ability to see the small detail that can make a difference by dotting the i and completely changing the perception, the Banksy vs graffiti debate.
If any culture failed to understand Open Source it may well be Japan’s neighbours, despite learning to bend it to their will uncomfortably quickly.
You are right. They even censor or slighty change the name of brands in some media. You won’t see a Japanese guy going to a McDonalds in a Japanese manga or anime: he will go to a McDino or some other weird stuff.
WcDonald’s… in fact its meme gone full circle since recent McDonalds have “manga” printed on the bags…. that self reference WcDonalds.
Let’s not make the bad decision of a young person an indictment against an entire ethnicity.
There’s this whole thing about how don’t do that anymore.
I understand why devs want more control over their work, obviously, but if that’s what you want then don’t go forking a GPL project. It explicitly grants the right to independently fork & modify. Either he misunderstands the point of copyleft licenses, or he wants to be a hypocrite by keeping the rights for himself while denying the same rights to others.
I’ll admit that I hadn’t heard of Floorp until now. It seems the decision to close the source has been reversed and the none-Mozilla code has been assigned an open source licence.
Such a terse reversal, he could have elaborated…
Poking the beehive must have changed his mind, haha.
It was wrong to try and close a copyleft project, but I still think it’s worth discussing his motives:
This is a dilemma for all software developers contemplating FOSS. FOSS software allows others to use your work without ever paying you. Heck even the might IBM/redhat are experiencing this. As important as FOSS rights are, it can be really hard to make a living from FOSS software development without some kind of corporate sponsorship. The developer of Floorp may find that his FOSS work won’t generate enough revenue to support him and I honestly don’t have a good answer for this.
I’ve been playing with Floorp and found it quite responsive, better for me than Firefox. Given the immaturity of the project I sort of understand the problem the young Dev is having, most early career Devs for that matter, they need to resources of open source but they have timelines way beyond what the web demands. It’s not the first time we’ve encountered this sort of issue and it won’t be the last.
Viewing a project like it’s an early draft of a piece of personal art is probably the first error, then distributing it before understanding what you are doing was perhaps another. Is the sin being too eager?
I like Floorp, and I hope the Dev can get some support to perhaps have a crack at making it a fulltime gig, assuming they want to, the web needs them.
The only thing you can do about forks from a realistic perspective is to ignore them or find a way to benefit from them…. if you attack the forks you just end up making problems for yourselves and others.
i would start looking at them and cherry-pick their modifications back to my repo, if they were good and valuable.
it’s a two way street.